I would never dream of framing your individual struggle in terms of ideology. All that stuff is secondary to you.

You have the right to do this. I wish you wouldn’t though.

One thing I know is that dopamine makes life bearable, by producing positive emotion and acting as a literal painkiller. Also, that dopamine is released any time the brain perceives you are moving toward a valued goal.

I think that if you’re open to trying one last thing before the finality of that gunshot wound, you might want to try helping others who are in a similar situation as you.

ANY kind of pain or suffering becomes meaningful if you vow that you will use it as input for a process by which you help others. With the hell you’ve been through, you would make a great counselor, social worker, or therapist.

I know in my own mental health journey, I’ve felt alienated and misunderstood by therapists who don’t seem to understand how much pain I’m in, or that such levels of pain even exist.

But then other times, I know I’m working with someone who has, themselves, suffered deeply. Who knows how bad it can get.

That can be you. You can turn all this misery into the backstory of how and why you became a therapist. You can help other people who’ve (a) been surrounded by extremists and had their perspective warped, (b) made drastic changes to themselves that they now regret.

If I’m reading you correctly, you are not happy with how your mtf transition has gone. But you also did not have the option of not doing it. You felt compelled by circumstance to try.

Now compare that experience to someone who feels honor bound to join a gang, for whom life is unbearable unless they make the plunge into a new group full of meaning. Now imagine they cover themselves head to toe in tattoos, altering their appearance forever in full dedication to their new path, and then the gang gets decimated in a war. Their tattoos gain them entrance nowhere, their brothers for whom they gave up their normal body are gone.

Can you imagine how they would feel? Yes you can, because you’ve been through something similar

Now imagine that person needs help. They need a therapist who can truly understand their pain. Imagine a soldier who went to afghanistan, transformed himself into a killer, maybe shot some innocent civilians because for a moment they appeared to be attacking his convoy. He can never go back to being an innocent person. His old life, his old self, is gone. He feels completely trapped in his new reality, and every day he feels a black despair, a hopeless dull pain that makes it impossible to take a deep breath, and his mind races, looking for a way out of his bind, and he knows that there is none because he went down a one-way road.

Imagine him trying to find a therapist who understands that pain. You could be that therapist, because you understand that pain.

Maybe, before you kill yourself, you should consider that your suffering is now something you own, and that you can give others an ear that few people can.

And I promise that if you can find a way to orient yourself toward a goal that matters deeply — far more deeply than “pay off my debts” or “bring on the revolution”, something like “be there for the other people who have suffered like I have” — then it will reduce your suffering and plant the seeds for some real joy.

Fuck doing something you enjoy. Those anti-suicide lines are apparently staffed by incredibly naive people, and for that I’m sorry. You are no longer naive, and that means you have something those idiots on the phone do not. You have the ability to empathize and connect with people whose lives are so deeply fucked that death seems to be the only way out.

The closer you’ve been to the abyss, the more you can help. See what I’m saying?

Fuck doing something you EnJoY. What saccharine horseshit to tell a person in a place as dark as the one you’re in now. Instead, do something meaningful.

It could be lots of things. Whatever matters to you. But just imagine for a second if you met another person with a history similar to your own. Imagine the relief in them when they realize that you can see them in a way nobody else can. Would you like to maybe try doing that? Being the therapist who’s been so deeply fucked they can actually help those who are deeply fucked?

You can do that. And there’s no downside. Maybe you try volunteering as a counselor or coach in a local org, and see where it takes you. And if it doesn’t work, you still have the option to leave.